Visit the home page for historic Fairhope Photography: Fairhope History
Visit the Real Estate site of Wade Ogletree, COLDWELL BANKER, JME Realty for Fairhope Real Estate and Real Estate tools: Fairhope Real Estate
Fairhope has come to a place where it is forced to forge a new identity. The Fairhope city council recently put a moratorium on new developments, giving them a few months to grapple with the success Fairhope has enjoyed and the growth that accompanies that success. Fairhope has long been a quaint and idyllic retreat. "Quaint" is a hard adjective to maintain. Towns rarely stay the same. They are growing or dying but rarely static. This love affair we have with out towns, this sense of place, of home, of beauty, of history, and of family ignites in us the desire to fight all change--to keep things the same. That, though, cannot be done. Instead, we must decide what the face of Fairhope will be going forward and move toward that, because we cannot help but move.
Perhaps, then, it is for this reason that I created HometownFairhope.com. It gives us a look back. We can see the way Fairhope was a hundred years ago, and we can watch it transform before our eyes. It is nostalgic, but it is also a reminder that we do not truly want to freeze a moment in time in any other way than shadows on paper. Life is more than any one moment, so is a town, and, thus, so is Fairhope. We do not live in the Fairhope of a hundred years ago, nor in her incarnation just fifty years past. Those who did live then have given us the treasure of what Fairhope is, today, and now we must decide what will be the Fairhope we hand to our children.
Wade Ogletree, 2006